There’s a familiar tension in modern analytics: teams want data products that are easy to discover and safe to consume, but they also want to move fast—often faster than the governance model can tolerate. In Microsoft Fabric, that tension frequently shows up as a perception of workspace sprawl. A “single product per workspace” model is clean on paper—strong boundaries, tidy ownership, straightforward promotion—but it can quickly turn into dozens (or hundreds) of workspaces to curate, secure, and operate. This post proposes a different pattern—an advanced lakehouse approach that treats the lakehouse itself like a product factory:

Microsoft Fabric’s Warehouse can now materialize external files into tables with straight‑ahead T‑SQL, and Materialized Lake Views (MLVs) have quietly leveled up with optimal refresh (including incremental) and stronger, UI‑backed monitoring. If your north star is Zero unmanaged copy, the question isn’t “should I materialize?”—it’s “how do I materialize responsibly under OneLake governance?” Here’s what changed since our last take—and what to use when.